Same argument goes for the government and the programs you denigrate.
No, the same argument doesn't work. Those programs were passed with the promise of actually improving things, not stemming a worse decline. And if you look at the data, the start of the decline coincides with the start of those programs. Public choice theory tells you why these programs don't work: they are subject to regulatory capture and rent seeking. Both economic theory and empirical data clearly tell you the same thing: these programs are harmful.
And if the economic examples don't convince you, look at other regulations and laws intended to safeguard and help the public: the fugitive slave act, eugenics and forced sterilizations, segregation, internment of Asian-Americans, and one of the worst killers, governmental agricultural and nutritional policies. And many of the people supporting those despicable programs are still the heroes of American progressives, the same people who are pushing a new generation of extremely harmful programs now.
Without them the robber barons
Do you know who the "robber barons" were in American history? Railroad and steel industrialists, who obtained their wealth through government handouts and government granted monopolies. The robbed the public by corrupting politics.
The answer is to reverse the corruption by corps and rich CEO's
Correct, corruption is the problem and reversing it is the answer.
If you try to pass more laws to fix the rent seeking and corruption of past laws, how do you imagine that works? Do you think there is a sudden outbreak of selflessness and competence in Congress? Of course not. If you pass more laws and regulations, you are going to get more of what we already have: more crony capitalism, more rent seeking, more regulatory capture.
To reverse the corruption, the only viable choice is to reduce the size of government and regulation. Government corruption, rent seeking, and crony capitalism are simply roughly proportional to the size of government.
Yes, that's pretty much what I meant by "this will make it clearer in the budget how costly these launches actually are."
Part of the problem is that NASA is probably not very good at estimating the risks of suppliers, and it isn't motivated to do so anyway because understating the risk and self-insuring is a good way of getting funding for programs that wouldn't pass if the budget had to include risk.
The federal government frequently self-insures. If the federal government were a business and made rational business decisions, that would make financial sense, and that's how it's usual justified. In reality, though, probably it mainly self-insures because it makes the costs of various programs appear lower than it actually is.
In any case, SpaceX's record doesn't seem to be that bad. I think a reasonable insurance premium based on their record might be 10-20% of launch cost.
I would be FASCINATED to hear your logic as to why government would seek to privatize (i.e. lose money) profits in order to socialize (i.e. lose money) the risks.
Simple: because politicians and government employees aren't selfless saints. Instead, they are corruptible, limited human beings primarily concerned with their own careers, reputation, and financial success. Among other things, they respond very well to lobbying.
Go tell that to the belching smokestacks, the carcinogen-laced groundwater, the deteriorating climate, the poisoned oceans. Tell it to the minimum wage workers who have to go on food stamps, the students with crushing loans and no job prospects, the retirees who've lost their savings to yet another bankster stock swindle. Tell it to the vanishing middle class, whose wages have been flat for forty years while productivity and the wealth of the 0.01% has soared. [...] My god, you are so utterly delusional, there are no words to describe it.
So, after decades of federal student loan programs, vastly expanding welfare and retirement programs, the war on poverty, numerous programs purported to help the middle class, all the kind of big government programs you favor, you yourself observe that people are worse off than before.
The conclusion any reasonable person would draw is that these programs don't work. You have to be completely delusional to think that after such colossal failures, the right policy is to expand those programs even further.
In this case, the government should either demand a discount from SpaceX in order to absorb the risk of launch loss,
The government can "demand" whatever it wants. But if this were a free market transaction, SpaceX would, in fact, be raising its prices by roughly the same amount as an insurer would.
Launch losses are a cost of doing business - pricing + negotiating power
In a free market, "negotiating power" has no influence on costs. Any rational business is simply going to want to make roughly a market return rate on their investment after all risks have been taken into account. Negotiating helps people to find the best of a number of otherwise fair deals, not to give one party a financial advantage.
Of course, what your thinking reveals is the insight that this is not a free market transaction but crony capitalism. That is, the government forces tax payers to give up money that is then handed off to its favorite private companies. In those kinds of transactions, "negotiating power" does matter; that's the economics of corruption, lobbying, influence peddling, and political abuse of power.
Big business by itself doesn't work that way. Big businesses have no way of socializing risk by themselves.
Big businesses can socialize risk only in collusion with big government. So, the determining factor of socializing risk isn't whether a business is big, but whether government is big and whether government has the power to socialize risk.
So, your statement would be more accurate as:
"Privatize the profits, socialize the risks."
That's how big government works in the USA and elsewhere.
And the solution to this problem isn't to regulate big businesses more (that only makes the problem worse) but to cut back the culprit, big and powerful government.
Gerstenmaier added that NASA is thinking about making these companies take out insurance policies that would cover the cost to taxpayers in the event of another failure.
I think this is a good idea, but not for the reason Gerstenmaier says. What it will do is get another private entity to look at the risks of these launches and price them accurately. This will make it clearer in the budget how costly these launches actually are.
However, the cost for insurance will simply be added on top of the contract, so the tax payer pays for it either way. In fact, with insurance, the tax payer will pay more on average than without insurance.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, to an investor the underlying value of a share is its share price.
The is some unknown true value that the share has; that's the "value" of the share. An investor makes a guess of what that value is; that's his "valuation" of the share. As a piece of property, a share also has a "value" to you as a person, in the same way that a dollar has a "value" to you; but that's not the value of the share, or even its valuation.
an investor would buy shares if they expect the share price to go up, even if they know the value of the company will remain the same or even go down
And that's why the distinction between the estimated value (valuation), the true value, and the value you place on something is important (there are many different ways of expressing that, so don't get hung up on the exact terminology). But it's actually even a lot more complicated than that. My overall point is that no value or money is lost just because the stock market dropped.
In your painting example, when you found out that your supposedly valuable painting was a fake, no valuable painting actually got destroyed. Also, finding out that it was a fake didn't cause you or anybody else to lose any money.
Said the guy who had just finished talking about how a valuation loss is not a loss in value.
And that is correct. Your mistake was to pay too much for the shares when you bought them. That's when you traded your valuable money for your worthless shares. The underlying value of the shares isn't affected by the change in share price; the share price is simply a noisy reflection of the underlying value of the share. It's noisy because people (like you in the example) make mistakes and pay too much or sell for too little.
And it's the purpose of capitalism to keep people like that from making more bad investments and shift the ability to invest to people who actually are good at it. Dollars and wealth are the way we do the bookkeeping for that.
But you'll still be sad if it was your investment (ie, its primary value is its high valuation).
I don't see in what possible way that is bad. If you are "sad" about investment losses, you are not a rational investor, and it is best for society if you get separated from your money, which is exactly what the loss itself accomplishes. And the sadness will hopefully compel you to avoid these situations in the future.
True, that video accurately illustrates how stupid and financially illiterate many people are. That's a problem with people, not with the stock market.
(Of course, chances are that David Mitchell himself is quite well off and using the stock market to his advantage, so he's a hypocrite too.)
It is entirely true that people's faith-based hype money isn't 'value'. [...] It's a bit of an ugly process.
It's not "faith based hype", it's simply investing. Investing produces bubbles and crashes. Nothing wrong with that.
but there is an unpleasant tendency for people to have structured things such that activities of real value are tied, more and less indirectly, to the need to maintain a given valuation
Well, if you structure your "things" that way and you don't insure against losing that valuation, you're stupid. How is that a problem with the stock market, rather than with you?
As far as I know, patients can see nurses for minor problems that can be addressed by nurses (specifically nurse practitioners)
Correct, and medical associations generally have been trying to limit expansion, for example trying to limit NPs to operating only under a doctor's supervision.
If you drastically reduce the requirements for becoming a doctor,
The requirements are so high because of AMA lobbying: they keep them that way, limit medical schools, and make sure that patients must see physicians even for problems that could be addressed by nurses or pharmacists. Meaning, what we have is this way because government wants it to be this way.
(Europe has a complementary problem: price controls on medical care keep physician salaries down, making the job unattractive compared to jobs with comparable salaries but less risk and less stress.)
Doctors' offices and hospitals are full of people who carry infections. You already have a high chance (probably around 30%) of coming out with an additional disease to the one you went in with, both from transmission from other patients, and through medical error. One more sick person (the doctor himself) hardly makes a difference.
Senate Intelligence Committee has unanimously approved draft legislation that would requires email providers and social media sites to report any suspected terrorist activities to the government.
Why stop there? If you're going to have various private parties report on each other, why not go full Stasi? Have teachers report on students, kids on parents, parents on kids, etc. And we clearly need a Division of Garbage Analysis and a Main Administration for Struggle Against Suspicious Persons.
Come on Dianne Feinstein, what are you waiting for? We all know it's what you really want anyway.
It's perfectly clear. Germane or France or any other EU country have to pay benefits to any EU resident according to the same rules as they pay to a national resident.
Really, do you pull this b.s. out of your ass? A minute with Google will show that you are wrong:
Since you are probably too uneducated to read German, let me help you with a translation for the most relevant section:
For a stay of up to three months EU citizens need nothing more than a valid identity document. If a EU citizen wants to reside more than three months in another Member State, he must be a salaried employee or have his own business. If he does not have gainful employment he must have sufficient means to support himself and his family, so that he does not need to take advantage of welfare or other government benefits. In addition, his entire family is required to carry health insurance. These regulations are based on the 2004 EU Residency Directive intended to limit "social tourism" within the EU.
I.e. the EU has rules in place specifically prohibiting what you recommend Greeks do.
I am European you ignorant American prick.
Being from Europe myself, I can indeed attest that both your understanding of politics and your conduct are typically European.
"any suggestion of leniency toward Snowden would likely run into strong political opposition in Congress as well as fierce resistance from hard-liners in the intelligence community."
Political opposition in Congress is relevant. Fierce resistance from the "intelligence community" is irrelevant; government employees may advise Congress and the president, but they have no business "resisting" political decisions.
"Any area of life where we currently use chronological age is faulty, if we knew more about biological age we could be more fair and egalitarian,"
I don't even know what "fairness" is supposed to mean in this case. Is it supposed to mean that people who are genetically better off pay extra for people with poor genes to compensate and help them? Or is it supposed to mean that people who are genetically better off pay less for healthcare because they need it less but are forced to retire later? Or what?
This attitude that government should somehow compensate for genetic differences to make society "fair and egalitarian" is offensive and dystopian. People would do well to read Harrison Bergeron again.
The only fair society is one that lets people make their own decisions about how to lead their own lives, and how to spread out savings and consumption over their lifetime.
If you insist on GUIs, Thunderbird and its derivatives have remained fairly stable. Sylpheed is another one. Many of the locally installed web mail systems, and many online providers also don't change their user interfaces much over time.
However, why exclude Pine or Mutt? They are extremely stable and fast, and the elderly in my experience have no particular problems with non-GUI interfaces; in fact, since a lot of their interaction is driven by little sticky notes with instructions like "first press this, then type that", they actually often have an easier time with such interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the same argument doesn't work. Those programs were passed with the promise of actually improving things, not stemming a worse decline. And if you look at the data, the start of the decline coincides with the start of those programs. Public choice theory tells you why these programs don't work: they are subject to regulatory capture and rent seeking. Both economic theory and empirical data clearly tell you the same thing: these programs are harmful.
And if the economic examples don't convince you, look at other regulations and laws intended to safeguard and help the public: the fugitive slave act, eugenics and forced sterilizations, segregation, internment of Asian-Americans, and one of the worst killers, governmental agricultural and nutritional policies. And many of the people supporting those despicable programs are still the heroes of American progressives, the same people who are pushing a new generation of extremely harmful programs now.
Do you know who the "robber barons" were in American history? Railroad and steel industrialists, who obtained their wealth through government handouts and government granted monopolies. The robbed the public by corrupting politics.
Correct, corruption is the problem and reversing it is the answer.
If you try to pass more laws to fix the rent seeking and corruption of past laws, how do you imagine that works? Do you think there is a sudden outbreak of selflessness and competence in Congress? Of course not. If you pass more laws and regulations, you are going to get more of what we already have: more crony capitalism, more rent seeking, more regulatory capture.
To reverse the corruption, the only viable choice is to reduce the size of government and regulation. Government corruption, rent seeking, and crony capitalism are simply roughly proportional to the size of government.
Yes, that's pretty much what I meant by "this will make it clearer in the budget how costly these launches actually are."
Part of the problem is that NASA is probably not very good at estimating the risks of suppliers, and it isn't motivated to do so anyway because understating the risk and self-insuring is a good way of getting funding for programs that wouldn't pass if the budget had to include risk.
Insurance always works that way; that's pretty much the definition of insurance: you pay someone a premium to reduce your risk.
The federal government frequently self-insures. If the federal government were a business and made rational business decisions, that would make financial sense, and that's how it's usual justified. In reality, though, probably it mainly self-insures because it makes the costs of various programs appear lower than it actually is.
In any case, SpaceX's record doesn't seem to be that bad. I think a reasonable insurance premium based on their record might be 10-20% of launch cost.
Simple: because politicians and government employees aren't selfless saints. Instead, they are corruptible, limited human beings primarily concerned with their own careers, reputation, and financial success. Among other things, they respond very well to lobbying.
So, after decades of federal student loan programs, vastly expanding welfare and retirement programs, the war on poverty, numerous programs purported to help the middle class, all the kind of big government programs you favor, you yourself observe that people are worse off than before.
The conclusion any reasonable person would draw is that these programs don't work. You have to be completely delusional to think that after such colossal failures, the right policy is to expand those programs even further.
The government can "demand" whatever it wants. But if this were a free market transaction, SpaceX would, in fact, be raising its prices by roughly the same amount as an insurer would.
In a free market, "negotiating power" has no influence on costs. Any rational business is simply going to want to make roughly a market return rate on their investment after all risks have been taken into account. Negotiating helps people to find the best of a number of otherwise fair deals, not to give one party a financial advantage.
Of course, what your thinking reveals is the insight that this is not a free market transaction but crony capitalism. That is, the government forces tax payers to give up money that is then handed off to its favorite private companies. In those kinds of transactions, "negotiating power" does matter; that's the economics of corruption, lobbying, influence peddling, and political abuse of power.
Big business by itself doesn't work that way. Big businesses have no way of socializing risk by themselves.
Big businesses can socialize risk only in collusion with big government. So, the determining factor of socializing risk isn't whether a business is big, but whether government is big and whether government has the power to socialize risk.
So, your statement would be more accurate as:
And the solution to this problem isn't to regulate big businesses more (that only makes the problem worse) but to cut back the culprit, big and powerful government.
I think this is a good idea, but not for the reason Gerstenmaier says. What it will do is get another private entity to look at the risks of these launches and price them accurately. This will make it clearer in the budget how costly these launches actually are.
However, the cost for insurance will simply be added on top of the contract, so the tax payer pays for it either way. In fact, with insurance, the tax payer will pay more on average than without insurance.
The is some unknown true value that the share has; that's the "value" of the share. An investor makes a guess of what that value is; that's his "valuation" of the share. As a piece of property, a share also has a "value" to you as a person, in the same way that a dollar has a "value" to you; but that's not the value of the share, or even its valuation.
And that's why the distinction between the estimated value (valuation), the true value, and the value you place on something is important (there are many different ways of expressing that, so don't get hung up on the exact terminology). But it's actually even a lot more complicated than that. My overall point is that no value or money is lost just because the stock market dropped.
In your painting example, when you found out that your supposedly valuable painting was a fake, no valuable painting actually got destroyed. Also, finding out that it was a fake didn't cause you or anybody else to lose any money.
And that is correct. Your mistake was to pay too much for the shares when you bought them. That's when you traded your valuable money for your worthless shares. The underlying value of the shares isn't affected by the change in share price; the share price is simply a noisy reflection of the underlying value of the share. It's noisy because people (like you in the example) make mistakes and pay too much or sell for too little.
And it's the purpose of capitalism to keep people like that from making more bad investments and shift the ability to invest to people who actually are good at it. Dollars and wealth are the way we do the bookkeeping for that.
I don't see in what possible way that is bad. If you are "sad" about investment losses, you are not a rational investor, and it is best for society if you get separated from your money, which is exactly what the loss itself accomplishes. And the sadness will hopefully compel you to avoid these situations in the future.
True, that video accurately illustrates how stupid and financially illiterate many people are. That's a problem with people, not with the stock market.
(Of course, chances are that David Mitchell himself is quite well off and using the stock market to his advantage, so he's a hypocrite too.)
What does the ability of private investors investing in private companies have to do with "banking establishments"?
And in what way is this crash "dangerous"? Do large numbers of people get killed or starve?
It's not "faith based hype", it's simply investing. Investing produces bubbles and crashes. Nothing wrong with that.
Well, if you structure your "things" that way and you don't insure against losing that valuation, you're stupid. How is that a problem with the stock market, rather than with you?
No value has been wiped out. What has been wiped out is valuation. There's a big difference.
Correct, and medical associations generally have been trying to limit expansion, for example trying to limit NPs to operating only under a doctor's supervision.
The requirements are so high because of AMA lobbying: they keep them that way, limit medical schools, and make sure that patients must see physicians even for problems that could be addressed by nurses or pharmacists. Meaning, what we have is this way because government wants it to be this way.
(Europe has a complementary problem: price controls on medical care keep physician salaries down, making the job unattractive compared to jobs with comparable salaries but less risk and less stress.)
Doctors' offices and hospitals are full of people who carry infections. You already have a high chance (probably around 30%) of coming out with an additional disease to the one you went in with, both from transmission from other patients, and through medical error. One more sick person (the doctor himself) hardly makes a difference.
Why stop there? If you're going to have various private parties report on each other, why not go full Stasi? Have teachers report on students, kids on parents, parents on kids, etc. And we clearly need a Division of Garbage Analysis and a Main Administration for Struggle Against Suspicious Persons.
Come on Dianne Feinstein, what are you waiting for? We all know it's what you really want anyway.
Great, so not only can the US government easily spy on it, so can the Swedish government.
Sorry, but running away isn't going to solve this problem.
Really, do you pull this b.s. out of your ass? A minute with Google will show that you are wrong:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir...
Since you are probably too uneducated to read German, let me help you with a translation for the most relevant section:
I.e. the EU has rules in place specifically prohibiting what you recommend Greeks do.
Being from Europe myself, I can indeed attest that both your understanding of politics and your conduct are typically European.
Reading the title, I was expecting a Docker vs LXC flamefest...
Political opposition in Congress is relevant. Fierce resistance from the "intelligence community" is irrelevant; government employees may advise Congress and the president, but they have no business "resisting" political decisions.
I don't even know what "fairness" is supposed to mean in this case. Is it supposed to mean that people who are genetically better off pay extra for people with poor genes to compensate and help them? Or is it supposed to mean that people who are genetically better off pay less for healthcare because they need it less but are forced to retire later? Or what?
This attitude that government should somehow compensate for genetic differences to make society "fair and egalitarian" is offensive and dystopian. People would do well to read Harrison Bergeron again.
The only fair society is one that lets people make their own decisions about how to lead their own lives, and how to spread out savings and consumption over their lifetime.
If you insist on GUIs, Thunderbird and its derivatives have remained fairly stable. Sylpheed is another one. Many of the locally installed web mail systems, and many online providers also don't change their user interfaces much over time.
However, why exclude Pine or Mutt? They are extremely stable and fast, and the elderly in my experience have no particular problems with non-GUI interfaces; in fact, since a lot of their interaction is driven by little sticky notes with instructions like "first press this, then type that", they actually often have an easier time with such interfaces.